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by clockworkouroboros



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who: Eighth Doctor Adventures - Various Authors
Genre: Classic Who Secret Santa 2019, EDAs spoilers, Kissing, M/M, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-17
Updated: 2019-12-17
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:54:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,934
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21836269
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clockworkouroboros/pseuds/clockworkouroboros
Summary: My Secret Santa gift for the wonderful, lovely Ouidamforeman! A small glimpse at Fitz’s love for the Doctor over the course of the EDAs.
Relationships: Anji Kapoor & Fitz Kreiner, Eighth Doctor/Fitz Kreiner
Comments: 10
Kudos: 22
Collections: Classic Who Secret Santa 2019





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**Author's Note:**

  * For [OuidaMForeman](https://archiveofourown.org/users/OuidaMForeman/gifts).



It started with a kiss.

Fitz was fairly certain the Doctor didn’t _mean_ anything by the kiss. He had been excited, that was all. Excited that Fitz was alive, safe, even. Excited that he had a friend there with him. He was fairly certain that he wasn’t meant to have _enjoyed_ the kiss. As kisses went, it wasn’t even all that great. It had been unexpected, in more ways than one. But he couldn’t stop thinking about it.

It was wrong, Fitz was certain, to think of the Doctor that way. It wasn’t correct, it wasn’t proper, it wasn’t polite. He didn’t want the Doctor to think he was a creep or anything. So he kept quiet. It was a strategy that had always worked in the past. Keep your eyes on the women, not the men. They’re the ones you have a chance with.

And then he overheard Sam talking to the Doctor about something. It was nothing important, just a passing comment in a conversation they were having. She was referencing something from before Fitz had met them, when she had been somewhere out in space, on some alien world, all alone. Fitz wondered if something like that would ever happen to him. Alone on an alien planet, struggling to survive. He rather liked the idea, but knew that the reality would be far more painful.

“It was just something Chris always said to me while we were dating,” Sam was saying, absentmindedly tugging on her blonde hair. Music was playing softly over the Doctor’s phonograph, something Fitz didn’t recognize, probably from his future. “It’s just weird to hear you say it,” she continued. “I didn’t realize I still associated that with Chris. It’s been ages since I thought about her.”

The conversation continued, drifting into other topics and thoughts, as conversations are wont to do, but Fitz froze. His ears had heard what Sam had said, but his brain was still processing it. He’s not quite sure what to make of it. He’d thought Sam liked men. Or at least, liked men a little bit. He’d gotten the impression that Sam rather liked the Doctor, at least. And he was certain he’d heard her talk about boyfriends in the past. Hell, she’d even gone on a date with him, even if it had ended badly. Not to mention the fact that he and the...other...Sam had...well. And now here she was, talking about a girlfriend.

Once his brain had managed to process that much, it began turning other possibilities over in his head. Sam wasn’t lesbian, he was fairly certain. He’d already worked out that she was open to dating men. Which meant that she could possibly be like him.

The easiest way to find out the answer to this would be by asking Sam, but Fitz wasn’t sure how to approach that situation. He was sure Sam wouldn’t mind talking to him about it, although he was also sure she’d start out being defensive—and he couldn’t really blame her for that. He knew he was from a less-enlightened time than 1997, that Sam found his era to be incredibly sexist and racist and God-knew-what-else, that any questions he could ask about any social issues would be received suspiciously, even if Sam had finally gotten used to him. So he wasn’t about to ask her.

But now that he was thinking about it, the more he noticed it. He saw the way she acted around both men and women, saw the casual flirting with them. Now that he was looking for it, it was more and more obvious. How could he have been so blind to this? He resolved to talk to her about it, to see if it was something everyone accepted in the future, to learn more about. He wanted to talk to someone who looked at people the same way he did, who felt the same sorts of things he did.

And then she left. And he left. And he became a copy. A clone. And he couldn’t talk to Sam anymore, and even if he could, he probably wouldn’t have remembered to, because he was a new person now, if he even counted as a person at all.

For whatever reason, though, the TARDIS had somehow known how he felt about the Doctor, though. Maybe even made him a little less afraid of those feelings. Oh, sure, he still felt doubts about it. But there was less fear there, more willingness to think about those things. Although he didn’t always think about them at the most opportune moments.

When he got a chance to talk to Iris about it, it was almost a relief. Iris was this gorgeous woman who looked every bit a badass science fiction heroine. A Time Lord, like the Doctor. And when he looked at her, all he could think of was the Doctor.

That wasn’t to say he wasn’t physically attracted to her. He was. She was beautiful. Well. Maybe beautiful wasn’t the right word, but she was _attractive,_ certainly. But instead of thinking about that, he would think about the Doctor.

“Oh, lovey,” Iris had said, taking his hands in hers. “I know how you feel. The Doctor is the Doctor, though. I don’t think he feels that way about anyone.”

“That doesn’t stop me from thinking about him, though,” Fitz replied. “And...well...I do. Think about him, I mean.” He sighed, and tried not to blush.

Iris smiled at him, a little sadly. “The Doctor loves you, I’m sure of it. But he doesn’t love people like you and me the way we love him. He’s full of this weird, cosmic, peace on earth and goodwill towards men sort of love. Not your sort of love.”

That was difficult to cope with. There was a lot that was difficult to cope with round about then, and that conversation, as nice as it had been, had only made it worse. Fitz couldn’t help but get the feeling that he was pining, pining for the Doctor, who would never love him back, not the way he wanted to be loved back.

Girlfriends helped take his mind off of these problems for a little while, but his girlfriends kept getting tortured or brutally murdered, so it didn’t really help. He tried not to think about his feelings for the Doctor too much.

And then the world turned to hell.

It wasn’t just that the TARDIS was destroyed, and they were now stuck travelling inside Compassion, but there was also The War, The War that was so important and so big and so insane that it didn’t even have a proper name. This was The War, the definite article, The War to end all wars in the way that the World Wars that Fitz had either grown up in or grown up hearing about could only dream of being. They weren’t just travelling _inside_ Compassion— _inside Compassion—_ they were trying to escape from Time Lords, from the Doctor’s old friend, from The War. The Doctor was running, and Fitz felt more and more like they were fugitives. He wondered if there was anything romantic in being a fugitive, in hiding from the Time Lords on desert worlds where the sunsets bathed the Doctor in shadows that made his eyes seem violet, or if there was anything sexy about helping refugees from the planet Yquatine. The idea of running off across the universe with the Doctor, evading capture from the most powerful beings in the universe certainly _seemed_ cool and sexy and romantic, but the reality of it was far more unpleasant, far more disgusting, far more disturbing than what Fitz would have liked. Just like everything else about this sort of adventuring.

Not that he wanted to stop. He had been travelling with the Doctor for too long now, fought evil on a million different worlds, in a million different places. He couldn’t just return home. He wasn’t even sure if there was a place he could call home anymore. He liked to think that, in that respect at least, he was like the Doctor. The Doctor’s home had been the TARDIS. And that was gone. Replaced by Compassion, who, for all that they had been through together, never seemed quite like a friend to Fitz. The sort of person he’d become _relatively_ close to more out of circumstance than choice. Not like he and Sam had been, he liked to think, even if his relationship had been a tumultuous one. Not like he and the Doctor were, or so he hoped.

But even then, that wasn’t enough. Hell had broken loose with the destruction of the TARDIS, but it just had to get worse. Of course it did. Fitz wasn’t sure who it was who was bringing all the bad luck, but it had to be either him or the Doctor. It was the only way to account for all the shit they’d been through. And this time, Hell meant going to Gallifrey—or, one of the Gallifreys—and destroying it. Destroying all of them. Leaving the Doctor to confront the _real_ him, the non-copy, the bitter, angry, ancient man who had never forgiven the Doctor for abandoning him. Leaving the Doctor alone on Earth, an amnesiac, with nothing but a scrap of paper. There was so much he wanted to say on that piece of paper, so much he wanted to tell the Doctor but couldn’t. He wanted to come clean about his feelings, about _everything,_ but he couldn’t. He knew he couldn’t.

And then, knowing everything about the Doctor—what he’d done, what he’d been forced to do—was one of the hardest things Fitz had ever done. The Doctor was so good, so pure, so wonderful, that Fitz couldn’t even reconcile the events on Gallifrey with everything he knew about the Doctor. He would look at the Doctor and see that same ageless, beautiful, pure face and remember Gallifrey. Remember the Doctor fitting Compassion with a randomizer. Remember how the Doctor left him, the _real_ him, to become Father Kreiner, old and nasty and bitter, replaced him with this shitty copy.

But for every bad thing Fitz remembered the Doctor doing, he could think of countless good things. The Doctor was kind, the Doctor was good, the Doctor was selfless. The Doctor wanted what was best for the universe, and the universe turned around and spat on him.

The Doctor was also turning to Fitz more for help. He trusted Fitz, more than he ever had done before. He didn’t have his memories, but he had his Fitz. And he was comfortable with Fitz. He’d said as much not long after they started travelling with Anji. The Doctor had looked at Fitz and said that he felt like home.

And now Fitz didn’t know what to do. He’d always assumed the Doctor meant the TARDIS whenever he talked about home. Just the TARDIS. Friends and companions could come and go, but the TARDIS would always be there. The TARDIS was the best friend the Doctor could ever have, Fitz knew that. He knew that because he, too, had that link with the TARDIS. Not the same as the Doctor’s, of course, but he was still extremely close with the ship.

You see, he was a copy.A fake. Not the real Fitz Kreiner at all. Sure he had those memories and the same body and everything, but he wasn’t real. He was a science experiment with a conscience. A clone with self-esteem issues. And it was all because of the TARDIS. She’d recreated him, turned him back into something that more closely resembled his original self. And that had left him with something resembling a link to the TARDIS. He’d felt something twist inside, when she’d been destroyed. When he showed up in 2001 to meet up with the Doctor again, he’d been almost as excited to see the TARDIS as he was to see the Doctor. She was part of him, a part of him that was more real than any of the original Fitz’s memories that she’d planted in his brain. 

Maybe the Doctor could sense that, subconsciously, through the fog of amnesia. Maybe he could tell that Fitz was closely linked to the TARDIS. Maybe that was why the Doctor had said that being with Fitz was like the first home he could remember.

That’s what Fitz told himself, at least. He didn’t want to raise his hopes. The Doctor was still that alien, _other_ presence. Still distant, still removed from the feelings that mere humans got. That cosmic peace-on-earth-and-goodwill-toward-men love, Iris had called it. Yeah. That was the Doctor, summed up. No amount of sexy guitar playing could make it any different.

It didn’t stop him from wishing that things could be different, that the Doctor could love him back, that he could stop all this damn _pining_ and act on all of this.

He wondered if Anji knew. She sometimes gave him pitying looks when he tried to impress the Doctor, when he would joke and laugh with the Doctor, wondering if the Doctor knew he was flirting. He wasn’t sure if she thought he was pathetic or if she could see straight through him and see all his feelings for the Doctor and felt sorry for him. Or maybe it was neither of those things, and he was just being paranoid.

One day, not long before Hitchemus, Anji cornered him. He was in his room, guitar on his lap, trying to figure out what he wanted to play. She knocked, but didn’t wait for an answer before opening the door and coming straight in. She was, as usual, dressed impeccably, although Anji somehow managed to look professional even when in old sweatshirts or weird, alien spacesuits.

“What’re you doing?” she asked, crossing her arms over chest. With Fitz sitting on his bed, she was actually taller than him, and he suspected that if he asked her to sit down, she would refuse, if only to maintain this unusual height difference. Short people were weird like that.

He shrugged. “A lot of nothing.”

“So I’m not interrupting anything important?”

Fitz let out a sarcastic half-breath, half-laugh. “Not unless sitting around doing nothing is suddenly important.”

“Alright, good. I wanted to talk to you about something.”

He eyed her suspiciously. “If this is about getting you home, I swear, the Doctor’s trying. He wasn’t good at piloting this thing even when he had his memories. Can’t imagine the amnesia’s helped at all.”

Anji rolled her eyes. “It wasn’t about that, actually, because you’ve explained that to me at least five times already. I know. There’s no telling when I’ll get home.” She let out a breath that was almost a sigh. “I _actually_ wanted to talk to you about something else.”

“What?”

“Well,” said Anji, clearly choosing her words carefully, “Was there anything...going on between you and the Doctor before the whole amnesia thing?”

“What d’you mean?”

“I’ve seen the way you flirt with him,” Anji said. “I wasn’t born yesterday, Fitz. I think it’s obvious to everyone other than the Doctor.”

Ah. She had it figured out. There were a few options for Fitz. He could deny it all, say that he was just close friends with the Doctor. He could tell her that yes, there was something going on between them before the amnesia thing, and that he was trying to get the Doctor to remember. Or he could tell her the truth. That he’d been in love with the Doctor for years, since that kiss, back when he’d still been travelling with Sam, long before anything with the TARDIS exploding, or Compassion turning into a TARDIS, or The War, or the destruction of Gallifrey, or the amnesia, or any of it. That he couldn’t act on it, because the Doctor wasn’t the same, he didn’t feel those things, not the way other people did. Pull out Iris’s peace-on-earth-and-goodwill-toward-men explanation, the one he’d been telling himself since he first heard Iris saying it. The one that kept him from actually trying to initiate anything.

“The Doctor doesn’t do things like that,” Fitz said. “There was never anything between us.”

Anji raised an eyebrow. “Really?” she said. “The Doctor cares about you more than he cares about himself.” The look on her face said that this was obvious to everyone, too.

“The Doctor’s like that,” Fitz tried to explain, trying to ignore the fact that his heart leapt when she said that, that his mind was already constructing elaborate scenarios in which he could tell the Doctor everything, that this tiny bit of encouragement was more than Fitz had allowed himself this entire time. “He loves everyone, Anji. He barely knows you and he already cares for you more than you realize. He latches onto anyone and everyone.” He got the feeling that if he used Iris’s exact wording, Anji would laugh at him.

“I’ve noticed that, too,” Anji said. “But it’s not the same. He trusts you, Fitz. If anything happened to you, I don’t know what he’d do. I think you should talk to the Doctor about how you feel.”

Fitz shook his head vehemently. “It’ll just make things awkward.”

“It’s your choice,” said Anji, but her eyebrow was raised again, judging him, he could tell. “I still think you should tell him. If you don’t make a move, someone else will. It can’t have escaped your notice that people seem to fall in love with him wherever we go.”

“And I can hardly blame them,” Fitz replied. “But he’s the Doctor. He doesn’t do those sorts of things. He’s beyond it all, I think.”

He got the feeling he hadn’t convinced Anji. But she didn’t argue the point with him any further, just got an odd look on her face whenever he and the Doctor would interact in ways that could be interpreted as flirting.

But then they went to Hitchemus. It was Fitz’s ideal society in many ways: you could actually make a living as a musician, he could sit around playing his guitar and doing nothing, and there were tame tigers walking around everywhere, which took some getting used to, but was badass once he’d gotten over the shock. Anji made comments about the “economic feasibility of this system of government,” but that was just Anji. It was, in Fitz’s mind, the best place he’d ever been, in all his travels with the Doctor.

Except, Anji’s warning seemed to have been correct. The Doctor was spending so much time with the composer, Karl, that even Fitz was beginning to get suspicious. It wasn’t that he was upset about it, of course. Fitz had had enough girlfriends while onboard the TARDIS to know that you can’t get jealous of people like that. But it was strange. The Doctor wasn’t the type of person to go in for relationships like that. Fitz should know, he’d spent all these bloody years bloody pining for the Doctor, and never once had it seemed like the Doctor cared about people in that way, just in general, let alone for Fitz. Even with Karl, the Doctor seemed to care for the man a great deal, even loved him, possibly. But Fitz couldn’t see anything in the Doctor’s behavior that indicated he was as desperately in love with Karl as Karl was in love with him.

Maybe he was just blind to these things where the Doctor was concerned. Maybe Anji was right. Not that he was going to say anything about it. And anyway, when everything went to hell on Hitchemus (because things _always_ went to hell when the Doctor showed up), Fitz was glad he hadn’t said anything. He was needed in other places, in other ways. He couldn’t pine after the Doctor anymore. He’d seen what that had done to Karl, and he didn’t want that to happen to him. He left his song about the Doctor unfinished. It was better that way. The Doctor was an ancient, near-immortal alien. His story would continue after Fitz died. There was no way someone as tiny as Fitz could encapsulate the Doctor in a song. He knew that much, at least. That had been Karl’s mistake.

It didn’t mean he didn’t still love the Doctor. But he was going to give up on the pining, enjoy the relationship that they had. He was the Doctor’s closest friend. Why give that up? Why couldn’t he love the Doctor that way?

And the Doctor needed him more than ever, because hell was continuing to break loose. Sometimes Fitz wondered if the Doctor had angered some ancient god or something, based on the sheer amount of horrible things he went through. He needed Fitz, and Fitz did his best. After all, the Doctor was sick. And he was getting married. And then he lost one of his hearts. He needed Fitz, not as a useless lovestruck idiot, but as a friend. Someone he could trust. That’s what Fitz needed to be.

Of course, things don’t always work out that way. Human emotions are tricky things. When Fitz was on Lebenswelt, his brain being engineered to fall desperately in love with Carmodi, he was still weirdly fixated on the Doctor. His arch-nemesis, like in some sort of Bond movie, where the hero and the villain have some sort of mutual respect bordering on attraction.

In the end, it had come down to choosing between the Doctor and Carmodi, and even though his brain was still weird, even though it was still telling him that he was in love with Carmodi, even though everything those people had put in his brain was still firing, still making him feel addicted to Carmodi, despite all of that, he chose the Doctor. It was the first time he’d ever openly admitted to loving the Doctor. It was a life-and-death situation, he was high on adrenaline and the weird stuff that had been done to his brain. And he admitted that he loved the Doctor.

In the aftermath, when they were onboard the TARDIS, recovering from the whole affair, Anji off taking a long bath somewhere, the Doctor took Fitz aside held his face between his hands, and kissed him.

This wasn’t like that first kiss, the one from so long ago, back when Sam was still around. This was thought-through, deliberate. Good. Fitz wanted it to go on forever.

And then the Doctor broke it off, beamed up at Fitz, hugged him, and said, “Thank you.”

“What for?” Fitz wracked his brain, trying to figure out if there was anything out of the ordinary he’d done.

“Coming back and helping me,” the Doctor said. “If you hadn’t, I would have died.”

This was it. This was the time to confess his feelings. To tell the Doctor he loved him. Fitz grinned weakly. “It’s what anyone would have done, Doc.”

_Stupidstupidstupidstupidbloodystupidbloodyfuckingstupididiot_

The Doctor shook his head, curls falling across his face. “Not anyone. Anji, probably. You? Without a doubt. I’m lucky. Not everyone has a Fitz.”

He could still salvage this. Make a move. Confess his love for the Doctor. Instead, he gave the Doctor a bear hug, made some comment about how the universe needed the Doctor much more than the Doctor needed a Fitz, and left.

No one ever said he was intelligent.

Meeting George Williamson was almost a blessing in disguise. He was a good-looking man, far more intelligent than Fitz could ever hope to be, and he’d gone and made the first move.

It had been shocking. Fitz was expecting the Victorian era to be like a Sherlock Holmes story, or else interminably dull. He wasn’t expecting to get a boyfriend out of the whole affair. He wondered if it was a sign that he was moving on, getting over the Doctor.

And then Siberia happened, and he was back with the Doctor, and George was gone, and Fitz couldn’t even mope around the TARDIS for a few weeks until he got over it, because they were stuck in the wrong universe, and they needed to get back to the right one, and everything had gone to hell. Again.

Fitz didn’t even have the time to be in love with the Doctor, and he found himself totally ignoring it with ease, except at random moments, when it would hit him like a lorry, and he would be momentarily overwhelmed by all of his feelings for the Doctor. It was usually at the most inopportune moments, too, which was a little annoying.

But by this point in time, Fitz was fairly certain that everyone was a little in love with Doctor. In his experience, at least, that was true. Except for maybe some of the other people who had travelled with him. He was sure Sam had been in love with him, but Compassion and Anji both seemed to have no problems with travelling with an exceedingly good-looking alien. And now there was Trix, and she seemed to be the same way.

Trix was also incredibly good-looking, but Fitz didn’t think he had a chance with her. She didn’t seem to be looking to stay in the TARDIS long-term, anyway. It would be stupid to start anything with her, especially when Fitz knew he’d go back to the Doctor in an instant.

After all, the Doctor was his one constant in life. The universe had proven that it could get rid of the TARDIS, but it hadn’t been able to prove that it could get rid of the Doctor. All that time ago, not long after Anji had joined them, the Doctor had said Fitz was like home. And, Fitz was realizing, he had reached a point where the Doctor was like home. It wasn’t the TARDIS that Fitz missed when he was gone with George. It had been the Doctor. The Doctor was what kept Fitz going. The Doctor was more important than anything else.

Of course, Fitz was also incredibly stupid at times. So he had a fling with Trix anyway. Even contemplated leaving the TARDIS, leaving the Doctor, all for her. In the end, though, he couldn’t do it. Told Trix that he loved her, but he had to stay with the Doctor.

“There isn’t a place for me here, in this place, in this time,” he’d told her. “I’m not from this era originally, and anyway, I’ve been travelling with the Doctor for so long that I don’t think I could adjust to something...normal.”

Trix hadn’t been happy, but nothing she could say could convince him to change his mind, and he’d left. Not on the best of terms, but at least on better terms with Anji, who’d been skeptical of his relationship with Trix from the start. She’d cornered him shortly before he broke up with Trix and asked, “What about the Doctor?”

“What about him?”

She pulled herself up to her full height, which still wasn’t very tall, and jabbed at him with her pointer finger. “You can’t have just gotten over him and moved on. Besides, you barely know Trix, even now. How long has she been a crew member on the TARDIS?”

Fitz shrugged. “You know how hard it is to keep track of time in there.”

“That’s a cop-out and you know it,” she’d replied. “I can’t tell you what to do, but if you want my advice, I think this is a stupid move.”

So he’d taken Anji’s advice and broken up with Trix. Gone back to the Doctor. Like he always did. Gone back to that comfort, that familiarity, that sense of belonging. It was the first time he’d ever travelled alone with the Doctor.

The Doctor had danced around the console, pushing buttons and flipping switches with all the joy of a child opening gifts at Christmas. The lighting of the console made ghostly shadows flicker across his face, his blue eyes shining. “Well, Fitz?” he asked. “Where should we look first?”

Fitz shrugged, his mouth twitching into a grin. “Dunno,” he said. “Doc?”

The Doctor looked up, over at Fitz, and Fitz thought he could see something starry reflected in the Doctor’s sky-blue eyes. “Yes?”

Fitz walked over, picked up the Doctor’s hands from off the console, held them in his own hands. “There’s something I want to tell you,” he said, rubbing the Doctor’s hands with his thumbs.

“What is it?”

Fitz paused, then leaned down, and kissed the Doctor. He could feel the Doctor’s lips move, almost instinctively, to better accommodate the kiss, almost in surprise. He closed his eyes.

He didn’t open them again until they at last broke apart. The Doctor looked up at him, eyes wide. “Is that what you wanted to tell me?” he asked.

“Something like that,” Fitz said. “It’s just you and me now, Doc.”

“I know,” the Doctor replied quietly. He took his hands out of Fitz’s and rested them on Fitz’s chest. “And I see that you’re offering a new angle to our relationship.”

Fitz raised his eyebrows. “You’ve kissed me before, Doc,” he said warily. “I’m just returning the favor.”

“I never said I objected to it,” the Doctor replied, and he raised himself up onto the tips of his toes, and pulled Fitz down a little bit by yanking on his t-shirt, and kissed him one more time.

When Fitz left to go to his own room, he allowed himself a sigh of contentment. He was happy. And he was home.


End file.
